A Thousand and One Nights. By Lara Tupper. Harvest, 240 pp., $13, paperback.

By Janice Harayda

A popular joke about the late Norman Vince Peale said that all of his sermons consisted of “three anecdotes in search of a point.” You might have a similar reaction to Laura Tupper’s first novel, A Thousand and One Nights.

Tupper has woven well-researched anecdotes about China into this story of a young American alto and her callow guitarist boyfriend from Yorkshire, who meet on a cruise ship and spend months performing as a duo in a plush hotel in Shanghai (where the only guests who don’t want to hear “Candle in the Wind” seem to want to hear “My Heart Will Go On”). On a train to Hangzhou, Karla and Jack receive “little black plastic bags for spitting.” And in a Shanghai market, Karla sees live snakes for sale, spinning in red buckets, and watches a man skin one alive, its flesh still wriggling and “a blue organ of some kind dangling” after the blade strikes.

But the anecdotes don’t coalesce into a story worthy of them. Karla and Jack run on empty, spending much of their time drinking, whining and bickering. A Thousand and One Nights has so little character and thematic development that at the end, Karla seems as masochistic and Jack as self-absorbed (and as bereft of credible Yorkshire accent) as the beginning. In a sense, both are shanghai’d by Shanghai. For all we learn about their attraction to each other, Tupper might as well have set them down in Secaucus.

Best line: Tupper’s description of the train to Hangzhou: “Karla and Jack had ‘soft seats,’ with cushions, and once on board they were given little plastic bags for spitting. There was no AC, and Karla was wearing tight, black jeans. There were a few other Caucasian faces in their train car, all flushed, and Jack and Karla ignored them. A uniformed girl served complimentary tea in white plastic cups. Bits of green herb floated up, then sank down.”

Worst line: “In truth, Karla was scared every night, and she was tired of being scared, tired of her own cycle of pathetic thoughts.”

Caveat lector: This review is based on an advance reading copy. Some material in the finished book may differ.

Furthermore: Tupper is a former lounge singer whose site says that she has performed “at sea and in the Mediterranean and Caribbean, and on land in Thailand, Japan, China and the United Arab Emirates.” She lives in New York City.